It is the year 2050 and we are witnessing the annual conference of the World Organisation of Flight Safety (WOOFS). At the podium is Mr Carlos Sanchez having just finished a rather long speech. He is handing over the Medal for Preservation of Human Life to a short man in his fifties. Uncomfortable in a oversized grey suit, the man is a software engineer and part time inventor from Boston, Massachusetts. He flats down his greying hair with one hand and holds the gold plated statue of a heart in the other. The photographers from the world press shout at him to lift it above his head. He does so and the audience raise the level of their applause.

If you missed the speech it went something like this. Mr. Peter Striker, employee at MIT, conceived of something that has revolutionised aviation safety. That claim is no exaggeration. In the year 2049 to 2050 there were no fatalities as a result of civil plane crashes. None.

He achieved this single handedly by conceiving of a way to bring passengers and crew safely to earth, in the event of a catastrophic system or structural failure of the plane, or that old chestnut, pilot error.

With his ‘inventor’s hat’ on Peter conflated several design solutions that bring heavy objects safety to earth. The first was watching the lunar module deploy a parachute as it plummeted into the Pacific Ocean. The footage was a rather fuzzy black and white video from the 1960’s but the image locked in his mind. The other inspiration came from the joke about sitting near the Black Box flight recorder if you want to survive a plane crash. Peter wondered how you could put passengers and crew in a literal ‘black box’ and how you could extract it from the plane before it crashes, not after.

He came up with the idea of a sort of ejector seat, as has saved the lives of many military pilots. But instead of a seat, the cockpit and passenger compartment can be pulled out of the plane by large parachutes. This pod came to be known as the POPE or the Protection of Passengers in Emergencies.

The engineers came up with a ‘double skin’ concept for the aircraft. Using the latest composite materials including mass produced spiders web filaments in structural polymers, they were able to reduce the weight of the outer skin. The effect was a minimal increase in weight gain and thus fuel consumption.

Their designs produced a long pod which was on runners and bearings and locked into the fuselage until an emergency.  The pilots were able, for the first time in the history of aircraft design, to make a decision to ‘abandon ship’. Instead of looking forward to a freezing dip wearing a plastic life preserver with a whistle and light, the passengers would all remain in their seats. The parachutes would deploy from the end of the plane and pull out the POPE. As it comes out further parachutes deploy along it’s entire length making it level off in a few seconds.

The rest is up to gravity and the wind. Balloon pilots look for a safe landing zone and this is something the pilots would have considered before deployment. The POPE descends either onto land or sea.

In the event of landing on land, it is strong enough to withstand impact, partly due to it’s curved outer shell and the reinforced frame under the passenger seats. Like a balloon, impact does not involve a direct collision. Lateral forces drag the pod until the parachutes collapse. Much of the kinetic energy is used up dragging the POPE and thus reducing stresses from impact which would otherwise cause damage and injury.

In a desert or forest or farmland, the passengers and crew can stay with the POPE until rescue arrives. Various advanced beacons send out messages containing vital information enabling a swift and successful rescue mission.

Whereas older planes were not designed to float on water for very long, the POPE is designed to remain afloat indefinitely. The parachutes are jettisoned and sea anchors deployed to prevent it moving to a less safe location. Again the pilots will aim to land the POPE away from danger.

As now all passenger aircraft contain POPE’s, there were three deployments in 2049. Two of these were overland. One in the Syrgarya Desert in Kazakhstan and in Oman near the Arabian Sea. In the latter case the pilots brought the POPE down fifty kilometres south of the city of Muscat. Emergency services reached the POPE in under thirty minutes and apart from minor injuries, nobody was hurt.

One critical advantage to this system is that the cockpit voice recorders and flight instruments recorders are preserved within the POPE. A full investigation is able to start straight away, with or without the fragments of the rest of the plane the search for which is costly and time consuming.

Military aircraft have adopted designs similar to POPE but ejecting the whole of the pilots cockpit only. Pilots no longer have to take the risks of injury and mental stress associated with the ejector seat!

After the photographs Peter Striker gave a short speech of thanks to those organisations who had helped him and a gibbe at those who had derided his concept. He noted that not everyone is born with the ability to make things better for others. When we see someone trying to do this, we should at least, listen.

He sat down and placed the trophy on the table beside him. His toes pointed slightly inwards and the public nature of his predicament obviously made him uncomfortable.

Blessed are the Meek